The Twelfth Transforming (52 page)

Tiye watched from the privileged shade of her kiosk as Meritaten stood alone in the vast expanse of the sanctuary, a small black head crowned with the golden cobra above a field of offering tables, bowed against the insufferable heat, swaying a little while her husband mounted the steps to the raised altar and began to pray. His words, though unintelligible, echoed anguished and pleading against the tall walls. He prostrated himself, then knelt, gripping the sides of the food-laden table, his forehead pressed against the stone. Meryra circled him with the incense and poured oil on his head. His groans rang out.

Beyond the altar the ben-ben rose, and on it his likeness smiled. The oil slipped lazily down his neck and trickled along his spine, glistening in the harsh light. In the fore-court the temple singers’ voices rose and fell. To Tiye there was something anciently barbaric about the scene, the twisting, tortured man, the rows of smoking slabs, the priests unnaturally motionless in white, the slight, gorgeously arrayed queen swaying faint and sick, alone in the huge expanse, and floating over all, like the compelling, emotionless voices of demons, the disembodied singing. The ferocity of the sun was almost unendurable, and the sudden fancy took Tiye that the Aten, feeding for years on the frenetic worship of his son, had grown bloated with it and yet insatiable, his growing strength at last overcoming the life-giving gentleness Akhenaten had taught, and being unleashed in its full horror over Egypt. The more Pharaoh moaned and prayed, the more the heat seemed to intensify. Tiye, with aching legs and paining back, sank onto the stool she had ordered placed in the sunshade. Meritaten turned around at the small movement, her face pale. Tiye beckoned, but after a moment’s hesitation, Meritaten shook her head, not daring to offend her father or the god by seeking shelter.

Glancing back at her son, Tiye froze. He was lying before the altar, but face up, his limbs rigid. His head was canted back at an impossible angle, and strangled cries were coming out of his mouth. Meryra stood at his feet, waving an incense holder over him. Tiye did not hesitate but strode into the glare, shouting at the priests as she went. Hurrying up the steps, Meritaten behind her, she bent over Pharaoh.

“Bring a litter quickly,” she ordered, “but a canopy first. Majesty, find Panhesy and have him send for the physicians.”

“But, Empress,” Meryra protested. “Litter bearers cannot come into the sanctuary! It is forbidden!”

She ignored him. Other priests were rushing to obey her, and already Pharaoh’s litter was moving along one of the aisles. Akhenaten’s teeth were now clenched, his eyes open wide and unseeing. Vomit dribbled from the corner of his mouth. “Go and tell those women in the forecourt to be silent!” Tiye shouted at Meryra. “It is too hot to sing!” Ashen and cowed, he went away, and presently the chanting faltered and stopped. Gently the litter bearers lifted Pharaoh, and the canopy was unfolded over him. Tiye followed as he was carried to his apartments.

By the time he was laid on his couch, the rigidity had gone out of his body, and he had begun to mutter and occasionally shout words of prayers, snatches of love songs, and long, incoherent speeches. She left him to the physicians and waited with Meritaten in the passage outside, where Parennefer, Panhesy, and other members of the staff were clustered anxiously. Several minutes later one of the physicians stepped from the room and bowed.

“What is the matter with him?” Tiye demanded.

“It seems to have been some kind of fit, Majesty,” he explained. “Pharaoh is already much improved, but weak.”

“Are you able to treat him?”

The man hunted for words. “No,” he said at last. “If Pharaoh were a common man and not a god, I would say that either the demons had him in their grip or that he suffered from a madness that under the law ensures a man complete protection. But as Pharaoh is divine …” Wisely he did not finish. Tiye dismissed him and, gesturing for Meritaten to follow, went into the room.

Akhenaten was propped up on pillows. Tiny shudders shook him intermittently, and his face was still gray from the violence of the attack, but his eyes were clear. Meritaten knelt to kiss his hand, and Tiye bowed, sitting on the couch beside his knees.

“They have ordered me to stay out of the sun,” he said. One hand crept into Tiye’s and clung to it tightly.

“Then you must obey, my son,” she answered, a sudden thought coming to her. “Did the god speak to you? You have been ill like this before, but never with such violence.”

The hooded eyes dropped. “No, the god did not speak. No vision came.”

Tiye stroked the long fingers. “Pharaoh, I want you to consider what will happen if someday the god visits a bout of illness upon you from which you do not recover, if the dreams in which he causes you to walk have no end. I do not speak of death,” she said hurriedly, seeing his expression harden. “But it is time to appoint an heir.”

“I have been thinking about it,” he said slowly, much to her surprise. “It would have to be a child of my holy loins. Tutankhaten is the only candidate.” He spoke the words clearly and sensibly, as though the fit had purified his mind. Tiye battled the desire to let her sheer astonishment at this turn of events show on her face, afraid that any reaction at all might deflect his train of thought.

“I think not,” she disagreed gently. “Tutankhaten is too young. He would become the prey of unscrupulous men who through him would seek to undo all you have done for the Disk.”

“You could be regent,” he offered, blinking up at her.

Tiye smiled into the simple, confident face. “Akhenaten, I am not going to live forever. Neither are you. Smenkhara is now sixteen, and a man. He would need no regent, only advisors. He is not your son but is of my body and your brother. Declare for him so that I may sleep in peace.” She watched him carefully for the telltale signs of distress, but he remained calm, lying loosely under the thin sheet, only the fingers warm in her grasp betraying any reaction. His face held an expression of sad dignity. Meritaten had gone suddenly still, her eyes fixed unblinkingly on Tiye.

“I would have to make him a full member of the family of the Disk,” he said musingly, “but perhaps it is ordained. He looks very like me, Mother, have you noticed? The same shape to his head.” Akhenaten gently removed his hand from hers and placed it on his breast. “I understood the things the people did not speak today,” he went on. “I pretended not to, but I did. They ask in vain. The Aten will not give us water. I know it. The sin must be mine, that the god does not hear my prayers. Perhaps he tires of his son, and his eyes have turned to a new incarnation.” His voice was full of defeat and a genuine sorrow. “Very well. Have the scroll prepared, and I shall sign and seal it, but not today.” The light voice was thick with fatigue. “I must sleep. Meritaten, stay with me. I am afraid.”

Hardly daring to acknowledge her victory, Tiye ordered a scribe to her own quarters and dictated the document giving Smenkhara the right to wear the Double Crown upon his brother’s death. She kept it with her, determined to waste no time and acquire Pharaoh’s seal as soon as possible the next day. Then she sent for Smenkhara. He did not appear for hours, and when at last he bowed before her, he was drowsy with wine.

“If I cannot swim or be with Meritaten, I might as well drink,” he said sulkily in answer to her sarcastic comment. “My friends and I were at Maru-Aten. There is not much foliage left, but the pavilion is cool.”

She threw the scroll at him. “Read that.”

Listlessly he unrolled it, leaning against the wall. When he had finished, he dropped it on the couch. “Well, it is about time,” he said, “but it means little now. Pharaoh could live on for many years while Meritaten grows old and fat and I waste away with boredom.”

“What have I done that the gods should have punished me with such a surly, ignorant, selfish, ungrateful son?” Tiye stormed. “l have just obtained Egypt for you, yet you still complain. Listen to me. From now on, Pharaoh will watch you closely. You must be dutiful in the temple. Close your Amun shrine. Do not spend too much time with your friends. We do not wish to suggest that you are planning to take the crown before it comes to you legitimately. It hurts me, Smenkhara, but I do not think that Pharaoh has long to live. You should think about what you will do with Egypt when he has gone.”

Smenkhara shrugged, and Tiye, watching him relaxed against the wall, seeing the slouching, thin shoulders and small swell under his belt, felt a pang of real fear go through her. “I like Akhetaten,” he replied. “You kept me from it long enough. I shall stay here and let Malkatta rot. I shall marry Meritaten and enjoy my rights as pharaoh.”

“It does not matter where you live as long as you take steps to stabilize our foreign dominion and restore the worship of Amun.”

“That sounds very uninteresting. I suppose I ought to think about sending out ambassadors. Have you any wine here, Mother?”

“No. Think about what you will do, but remember that you are not pharaoh yet. If you appear too eager, Pharaoh might change his mind.”

“What mind?” Smenkhara laughed.

To her astonishment, Tiye felt her eyes fill with tears. “It is a mind filled with the kind of dreams no god would even deign to show you,” she said thickly. “I refuse to let you make fun of him, and I order you to shut the blasphemous mouths of your so-called friends. He is my son, and I love him. Get out of my sight.”

“He was your husband, too, as long as you had use for him,” Smenkhara said rudely, pulling himself away from the wall, bowing perfunctorily, and sauntering to the door. “Do not think, Empress, that you can use me also. When the Double Crown is on my head and Meritaten is in my bed, I will be grateful, but not until then.” He did not wait for a retort or a dismissal, and the door slammed shut behind him.

Tiye lay back and let the tears come. They were not solely for Akhenaten but also for herself, the sudden, helpless weeping of the old, for whom self-pity is an inviting indulgence. Smenkhara was a callous, self-seeking man who was not yet aware that in looking with such scorn upon his brother he was seeing himself.

Pharaoh ratified the document of succession the next day, as he had promised. A ripple of relief went through the palace, and the more naive courtiers and large numbers of the city dwellers went to the river, watching the dribble of water the river had now become and expecting the Aten to signal his pleasure by releasing the flood. But others were too preoccupied to care what Horus might be in the nest, for news had arrived from the Delta that disease was beginning to spread among the herds, whose grazing land was becoming bare. Frantic dispatches were exchanged between courtiers and their stewards on the Delta estates, but all knew there was nothing to be done.

Djarukha was faring less badly than other estates. Two large lakes were maintained on Tiye’s property and at her order were being used to at least sprinkle the fields so that some grass might be available for her cattle. She also kept a store of grain there that her steward opened for the villages that housed her workers. She did not intend to be faced with dead fellahin, no one to work when the Nile did rise again. Ay was attempting to relieve those on the family estate at Akhmin with the same measures, but the slaves of other nobles were not so fortunate.

Pakhons and Payni dragged slowly by, and now the emaciated bodies of peasants began to be found cast against the banks beneath the water steps in Akhetaten itself, mingled with the bodies of oxen and decomposing goats. The courtiers were shocked and indignant, and Ay commissioned soldiers to patrol the river near the southern customs house at all times so that they might hook the bodies out of the water before they drifted within sight of the city. But they could not snare every one, and the nobles kept as far from the Nile as they could so that they might not see or smell Egypt’s agony. Pharaoh supplied the favored of the city with grain. Akhetaten was magic, was holy, was the seat of the god and his chosen family, and in it, no citizen was allowed to go hungry. The dwellers of the city sat down to bread and last year’s wine while the fire of Shemu consumed the land and Egypt lay like a barren desert, filled only with the wails and keening of mourners.

Nefertiti’s lush terraces began to wither. Whether the deposed queen re fused all contact with the city, immuring herself in wounded pride, or Pharaoh himself had ordered that no communication take place, Tiye did not know, but she sent Huya to the north palace to make certain her niece was in good health. He returned with only his own impressions. The lake had dried up. Nefertiti was well, although there was sickness among her staff.

“The queen is very silent,” he said, “and sharp-tongued when she does speak. She has put on a little weight, but it only adds to her loveliness. Her face is becoming very sorrowful.”

Tiye was reassured to know that Nefertiti was well and seemed to be ruling her own little kingdom capably. She resolved to secure her release if Smenkhara became Pharaoh in her lifetime. Nefertiti would no longer be in a position to cause much harm in government.

The sickness in the north palace soon invaded the central city as well. Hardest struck in the royal palace were the nurseries and the older women on the harem staff. Huya, worried and harassed as he tried to organize the comings and goings of physicians, isolate the dying from the healthy, and see to the removal of bodies, advised Tiye to remove Tutankhaten and Beketaten from the palace entirely. Tiye immediately arranged for the children to stay across the river with Tey. Pharaoh, buoyed by the certainty that in making Smenkhara his heir he had placated the Disk, was convinced that the sickness would soon die away. Although high summer had come, he paraded through the harem apartments preceded by a worshipping Meryra, rebuking the ill and dying for their lack of faith and promising them that soon the river would flood and their bodies would be cleansed. But looking up at their king’s wet, red mouth, the trembling of his hands, the feverish gleam in his eyes, the stricken saw death grinning at them over his shoulder.

The sem-priests and employees of the palace House of the Dead worked steadily to prepare those who had died within Pharaoh’s domain for burial, but the place of embalming for the ordinary citizens of Akhetaten soon became so choked with rotting corpses that a special edict was issued from the temple Office of Physicians allowing bodies to receive a rudimentary embalming before being buried immediately in the desert. Bereaved families found themselves observing the obligatory seventy days of mourning for relatives who had already been placed in the sand. Worse still, many of the dead decomposed so rapidly that by the time the hard-pressed embalmers came to examine them, they were no longer able to be preserved.